real food, real cooking, real kung fu

If I were stranded on a deserted island and could only have five cookbooks (er, deserted except for access to any and all ingredients, kitchen supplies and cooking implements) one book that would definitely be among them is How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.

You may know Bittman as The Minimalist. He has a number of cookbooks, writes cooking columns and had a TV show on PBS. I really enjoy his work and his simple but quality approach to culinary delights.

In How to Cook Everything, Bittman offers recipes for, well, just about everything as the name implies. It has an absurd number of recipes for a single book (although it is over 1000 pages) and covers the whole spectrum, from salads to seafood to baked goods to meats and soups to desert, he really does have it all.

What do you want to make? English muffins? Got it. Clafouti or burritos? Yep. Roast saddle of lamp? Uh-huh. Teriyaki chicken or bruchetta? Yes, indeed. Brioche and quick breads? Of course. Potstickers, mayonnaise, Pina Coladas and chocolate layer cake? Yes, yes and yes. In a single book Bittman provides tried and true recipes for thousands of staples. It is my go-to book whenever I decide to make something I’ve never made before and for those recipes I make again and again. Some of my favorites that I’ve had marked with sticky tabs for years are his quick bread recipes, tomato sauces, beans and rice and fish en papillote (fish in packages).

Voluminous? Yes! But not as bad as cluttering your bookshelf with 18 other cookbooks to cover the same recipes. In fact I’ve used mine so much it’s starting to come apart and I need to replace it. I will get the hard cover version next time so it can stand up to my abuse.

I am lucky enough to have a wonderful friendly neighborhood farmer who occasionally offers to his inner circle fine items he makes from his pastured meats like bacon, bratwurst and sausage. Recently I got a few pounds of an amazing somewhat hot Italian sausage that he made. At the same time, I ended up in possession of a large number of red, orange and yellow bell peppers (Sprouts had a sale on not-so-perfect but organic peppers).

There was only one thing to do.

Of course if I was going to make sausage and peppers I needed something to display them on. It had to be a potato, and for the most eye pleasing plating, they needed to be turned into hash browns. Welcome to the most delicious sausage and peppers ever. It’s simple and it’s satisfying. You’re welcome.

KKF Sausage & Peppers with Hash Browns

1 pound of the best quality sausage links you can get your hands on (raw)*

2 large russet potatoes (about 2 pounds)

4 bell peppers (mix of red, yellow and orange), thinly sliced

4 T butter

2 T olive oil

1 T garlic powder

1 T onion powder

2 t paprika

salt & pepper to taste

Bring a pot of water to boil and simmer the sausages for about 30 minutes. Shred the potatoes in your food processor. Move the spuds to a large bowl and stir in the garlic powder, onion powder, paprika and a little salt and pepper (you can always add more later.) Melt 2 T of the butter in a cast iron pan over high heat and add the oil. Spread the potato mix over the fat and cover. Let it sit, undisturbed for about five minutes, then reduce heat to low and give it another 8-10 minutes until the potatoes are mostly soft. Cover and set aside.

In another cast iron pan melt another 2 T of butter. When it is nice and hot add the sausage and brown them up on all sides. I usually let them go about two minutes or so, then roll them until they are brown and crunchy looking all the way around. Move to a cutting board and let them cool. In the leftover butter and juices from the sausages, add your sliced peppers. (You can add more fat if needed but usually what’s left is sufficient.) Sauté the peppers with about a half a teaspoon of salt until they are just softened.

While your peppers are cooking and your sausages are cool enough to touch, slice them on the diagonal in about one inch slices. When the peppers are done, add the sausages back to the pan and heat through.

To serve, layer a serving of hash browns (crunchy side up if you please) on the plate and pile peppers and sausage medallions on top. Delicious!
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*This is the most important element of this recipe. Your sausage and peppers will only be as good as your sausages.

The week before last I prattled on about my favorite kitchen gadgets. This week I thought I’d also thought I’d relate the story of one of my biggest gadget kung faux pas in recent years.

I’ve had my trusty Cuisinart food processor for about ten years. I love it, and it’s just as powerful now as the day we brought it home from the hospital Santa gave it to me for Christmas. But as one often does after eight years or so my eyes started straying to the new, hot models and I started fantasizing about their amazing features. Multiple sized work bowls. A dough hook. Wide mouthed feeders.

Oh yeah, baby. So I took the plunge and dropped $250+ on the new hotness, relegating my old faithful to the basement. I shredded, sliced and pureed in my HUGE new machine. And there was the first sign that my kitchen karma was turning south.

It was giant. And heavy. And barely fit under my counter. And the huge lid was another monstrosity that took up twice the room in my dishwasher as the old one.

Then there were those magical nesting work bowls of different sizes. The thing is in order to use any of them you also have to use the large one. That means at least two bowls to clean instead of one. More to clean = kitchen fail.

Finally one day I went to make mayonnaise. I put my small work bowl into place (with the large beneath it, both of which would likely need to be washed at the end of the production), added my egg yolks and mustard and let it rip. As I slowly drizzled in my olive oil it became clear that I had no emulsion. Zip, zero, nada.

Kind of important for mayonnaise.

Unable to revive my would-be mayo, I tried again. And again, I failed to emulsify.

What the heck?

It would seem that the blade was not close enough to bottom of the work bowl to properly blend my egg yolks and mustard. My giant new food processor was a total let down.

That was the last straw. I went down into the basement and retrieved Old Faithful. She was not spiteful of my cheating ways. I added my ingredients to her slightly chipped old work bowl and POW. Mayo: smooth, creamy and beautiful as always.

The robotic monstrosity is still under my kitchen counter, and when I have need to shred 15 pounds of cheese or make hummus to feed a crowd, it is there, ready and waiting. But so is Old Faithful, and I pull her out 9 times out of 10 when I need to take something for a spin.

Everyone has their food memories of the holidays. There’s something about growing up with culinary traditions that keeps them completely ingrained in us so that as adults we can almost feel like kids again when we have those foods. The taste, the aroma…the violent mutiny.

There are some things you just don’t mess with. My mom’s sage and onion dressing is one of them.

The Kung Fu Mama failed one year to make this stuffing for Thanksgiving dinner, opting, of all things, to try something new. A violent overthrow of the kitchen almost took place, and it has had its rightful spot on the feast menu ever since.

We always had this for Thanksgiving, but this would make a great side for your Christmas meal, or heck, any time you roast a bird or have a ham. Enjoy, but beware…it’s addictive!

The Kung Fu Mama’s Sage & Onion Dressing

4-5 cups bread cubes

1 small onion, diced

2 eggs

2-3 cups chicken stock*

1½ -2 T dried rubbed sage

2 t salt

Put your bread cubes in a large bowl and cover with a towel overnight or for at least four hours. You want them to be dry but not crunchy.

Add the diced onion, sage and salt. Beat the eggs and stir them into the mixture.

Add the chicken stock little by little, stirring and letting it sit after each half cup addition. Make sure all the stock gets soaked up before adding more. Once you start to see stock accumulating in the bottom of the bowl stop adding liquid. You want it to be moist, not soggy.

Butter an 8-inch square glass baking dish and pour the dressing in, pressing down slightly just to make sure it is even throughout.

Bake at 350 degrees for about an hour, until the top is crunchy and it feels spongy.

* The amount of stock you need will vary depending on how dry your bread cubes are and the humidity level in your house. 3 cups is the most I’ve ever needed.

I will freely admit that I’m a kitchen gadget junkie. My hero Alton Brown would be appalled at my kitchen, which is filled will all manner of unitaskers. However, some of them are so unbelievably handy that I think I could turn him to the dark side. Here are some of my favorites:The Garlic Twist: Heavy enough to smash your garlic cloves and big enough to mince up to 6 cloves at a time, this is my all-time favorite unitasker. Unless you count smashing and mincing garlic as two activities instead of one. In the end, it turns whole garlic cloves into many, many tiny bits of garlic. But it does it in a snap. Smash your garlic, stick the pieces into the twist and…you guessed it. Twist the contraption. It turns those cloves nearly into paste if you want it to. I love it and use it every single time I need garlic. Which is often. Luckily it’s easy to clean (just make sure you rinse it right away because dried on garlic is a pain) and it’s dishwasher safe.

NOTE: Don’t be scammed by the $2.15 garlic twist that looks similar to this one. It is a knock-off and is NOT the same. You’ll be bummed and think bad thoughts about KKF. I won’t lead you astray. Buy the real thing.The Lemon Squeezer: If you have a little plastic lemon in your fridge right now, I want you to stop what you’re doing and go get it. Then throw it directly into the trash can. You do not need it nor do you want it. Fresh lemon juice is more nutritious and doesn’t contain garbage like the plastic lemon variety. Plus, it’s easy to squeeze when you have yourself one of these lemon squeezers. They come in lime and orange sizes too but I find the lemon size to be very multi-purpose. You can squeeze a lemon, you can squeeze a lime, and if you need to squeeze an orange you can cut it into four chunks and squeeze away so it’s not exactly a unitasker. (If you need to squeeze enough oranges for orange juice go get a juicer.) Fresh lemon water every day is an easy and beneficial health regimen to get into. Plus it’s a natural breath freshener and tastes light and refreshing!Mr. Pounder: Ok, the actual name brand is Leifheit but in my kitchen it’s known as Mr. Pounder. This thing is heavy (which is what you want in a pounder) and has two handy surfaces: flat for turning pieces of pork, chicken and beef into lovely, uniform thickness cutlets and spiked for tenderizing and home defense. It’s also big enough to handle the job but small enough that you can single out the thick spots without vaporizing the thin spots. I heart Mr. Pounder, and use it every time I make chicken masala or schnitzel to please test subject Bill. It also makes quick work of cabbage for making naturally fermented sauerkraut.

Did you go throw out your plastic lemon? Well?

The Clay Baker: A Romertopf, to be exact. I got this amazing baker as a wedding gift more than 13 years ago and it is a work horse. The reason it’s a unitasker is because I only use it for making roast chicken. You can make a great many other things in it, but it is STELLAR for perfectly roasting a free range bird in your oven. I use Nourished Kitchen’s method and it produces a tender, delicious bird with crunchy skin every time without fail. Get one of these bakers and you will not be disappointed.

This is by no means a complete list of the gadgets I know and love, but they are definitely some of my favorites! What are some of your favorite kitchen tools?

I used to be afraid of fish. No, I don’t mean fish phobia. I mean I was afraid to cook it. I’m not sure what fostered this fear, but many home cooks have it. The best I could manage for a long time was pre-breaded fish sticks. Luckily, fantastic fish is only minutes away and you can end up with perfectly cooked and delicious fish each time, as I discovered a no-fail fish cooking technique that has become my stand by. It works on most any fish filet from catfish to red snapper to salmon.

We had this last night with some Dover sole and Test Subject Bill pronounced it the best fish in some time. In fact, he told me that I should always make fish this way from now on. I’m not going to take that as a negative reflection on my previous fish dishes.

I don’t quite remember the provenance of this technique/recipe, but I’m pretty sure Alton Brown had something to do with it.

Sift together flour and Old Bay. Melt butter in a frying pan. Dredge filets in the flour mix. The filets should be moist enough for a thin layer of the flour mixture to stick. When the butter is nice and hot (make sure it’s hot!) add the fish to the pan, “top” side down first. (This makes presentation look nicer as the first side to fry is more even and clean.) Fry 10 minutes per inch of thickness at it’s thickest point, turning over half way through the cooking time. (I find that a good fish flipper is the best tool for this job.)

I like to use the remaining butter in the pan as a brown butter sauce over the fish or on whatever vegetable I’m serving with it. YUMMY.

If you’re making a full pound increase the volume of ingredients by about 50%. (That’s 9 T flour, 1.5 T seasoning and 6 T butter for those math challenged.) How much you have leftover will vary based on how much surface area your fish has, but ALWAYS TOSS THE LEFTOVER FLOUR. Right? Right.

One of my favorite cookbooks is not a cookbook at all, but more of a handy manual guiding you on how to become your own hero in the kitchen. Ok, maybe not. Or why not…all depends on your definition of a hero.

This amazing book is The Flavor Bible*. I was turned on to this book by one of the chefs when I was taking some cooking classes the Viking Cooking School. I was intrigued by the idea of a compendium of culinary flavor matching and sprung for it even though I usually don’t spend that much on a book. (Call me cheap, but I like the free-ness of Google.)

This book, however, is no Google. And I mean that in a good way. Google might be good for recipes worth putting your own personal spin on, but it’s not always so good for really teaching you what goes with what or how to build depth in a dish. Not all flavor combos are as intuitive as tomato and basil or ham and Swiss. When you’re ready to take your recipe tinkering to a new level, open your kitchen to The Flavor Bible.

The Flavor Bible opens with a discussion about taste, mouth feel, aroma and the “X” factor. It covers weather, seasonality, occasion, weight and more. While this is fun, it’s thankfully a small portion of the book because I’m just not all that crazy about introductory parts of books. I want to get into the meat of things so to speak. But as far as intros go this one is actually pretty good, and about the right length.

The bulk of the book is thesaurus of food. Look up an ingredient, a protein, a spice, a cuisine type, etc. and it gives you a plethora of options to compliment it. In fact a few weeks ago when I made my saffron salmon, the addition of coriander in that dish was due to the suggestion of The Flavor Bible. Who would have thought that cloves and beets could be friends? Or passion fruit and champagne? Feel like giving your dish an African flair? There’s a whole list of ingredients to spin your dish with (and it’s even broken out by North, South and West African.)

The book also lists out Flavor Affinities – groups of ingredients that sing together beautifully (my description, not theirs). For example, it offers avocado + lemon + smoked trout. Or fennel +almond + fennel seeds + honey + lemon. When you’re stumped, you’re never at a loss for long with all the options this book provides. It’s a great way to learn your way around flavor combinations and make a good dish great.

It is totally worth the price to pick up this gem for yourself or the cook in your life. Christmas is just around the corner!

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*If you buy through my links it costs no different and I get a small commission. Thanks for your support!